Monday, February 24, 2014

Don't let down Jews when justice in reach

The addition of a 'Jewish Refugee Day' to the calendar will help gain recognition for Jews forced out of Arab countries, but Israel's incompetent management of claims is stymying efforts to gain compensation, Lyn Julius argues in the Times of Israel:

They tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat.

It’s a fitting description of the event my organisation, Harif, held this week to marked the first ever ‘Jewish Refugee Day’.

Over 300 guests, many dressed in tarbush hats
and kaftans, came to enjoy the food and entertainment. They also came,
not just to remember the forced exodus of 870,000 Jews from 10 Arab
countries, but to celebrate their freedom from oppression, persecution
and violence.

The celebrated storyteller Yossi Alfi told how
his grandmother had smuggled him as a three-year old from Iraq into
Israel under her skirts. As the Jewish underground did not allow
children under ten, Alfi’s grandmother pretended Yossi was a midget!

Accompanied by oud, violin and tabla players, Yossi’s daughter Sari Alfi sang what has become the anthem for refugees from Arab lands: Fog-An-Nahal.

Inspired by Harif’s example, we hope that people will start marking Jewish Refugee Day
around the world. Like Holocaust Memorial Day, Jewish Refugee Day will
provide a focus, and a corrective. Jewish children learn about the
Kishinev pogrom, but how many have heard of the Farhud in Iraq? Official
ceremonies, school projects, TV programmes and events in Israel and
worldwide would spread awareness not just of Oriental Jewry’s history
and exodus but their rich, pre-Islamic culture and heritage.

After decades of neglect by successive Israeli
governments, the Jewish refugee issue is emerging like a mole blinking
into the sunlight. Advocates for Jews from Arab Countries are finally
seeing the work of decades come to fruition.

If Jewish Refugee Day is a means of achieving
recognition, a recent development brings within reach the prospect of
compensation: American senior envoy Martin Indyk has told US Jewish
leaders that Secretary of State John Kerry is considering including in
his framework peace agreement compensation for the thousands of Jews
forced to abandon Arab lands.

For the first time in living memory, the influential Economist magazine published an article on Jewish refugees and their losses.

Critics say
that the US is trying to “buy off” the most recalcitrant sector of the
Israeli electorate, the right-leaning Mizrahim, in return for
far-reaching territorial concessions, but MK Shimon Ohayon, who proposed
the Knesset bill for a Jewish Refugee Day in the Israeli calendar, has
welcomed the prospective compensation clause as “a step in the right
direction”.

It is high time that a peace settlement took
into account the rights of both sets of refugees – Jewish as well as
Arab. An appreciation of the tragedy that occurred on both sides would
help foster reconciliation and peace.

However, there is a large fly in the ointment — Israel’s own chief negotiator, Tzipi Livni. Despite a 2010 Knesset law requiring
Jewish refugees to be on the peace agenda, Livni has opposed raising
the very question, claiming there is “no connection” between Jewish and
Palestinian refugees.

History has shown otherwise. The Palestinian
leadership incited anti-Jewish hatred in the Arab world well before
Israel’s creation, and dragged the Arab League into war against the
newborn state.

But a damning report
by Israel’s state comptroller, Joseph Shapira, blasts the Israeli
government’s half-hearted and under-resourced approach to collecting
claims from aging Jewish refugees before they die, and its failure to
computerise 14,000 old claims. Haaretz reported: “Even if peace were to break out tomorrow, Israel would be hard-pressed to present a solid claim…”

The possible reasons for this, Haaretz continued, are ‘many and absurd.’

And the incompetence displayed on this matter --according to the state controller-- is too typical of how some important matters are neglected here --- until a floor falls in or Arab rockets start coming down.

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Introduction

In just 50 years, almost a million Jews, whose communities stretch back up to 3,000 years, have been 'ethnically cleansed' from 10 Arab countries. These refugees outnumber the Palestinian refugees two to one, but their narrative has all but been ignored. Unlike Palestinian refugees, they fled not war, but systematic persecution. Seen in this light, Israel, where some 50 percent of the Jewish population descend from these refugees and are now full citizens, is the legitimate expression of the self-determination of an oppressed indigenous, Middle Eastern people.This website is dedicated to preserving the memory of the near-extinct Jewish communities, which can never return to what and where they once were - even if they wanted to. It will attempt to pass on the stories of the Jewish refugees and their current struggle for recognition and restitution. Awareness of the injustice done to these Jews can only advance the cause of peace and reconciliation.(Iran: once an ally of Israel, the Islamic Republic of Iran is now an implacable enemy and numbers of Iranian Jews have fallen drastically from 80,000 to 20,000 since the 1979 Islamic revolution. Their plight - and that of all other communities threatened by Islamism - does therefore fall within the scope of this blog.)